On December 9, 2024, while the world was stunned to understand that the rebels had taken Damascus with little resistance and fled to Moscow, a video recorded with a mobile phone conquered social networks. In it, a Syrian – then unknown, pale and thin (he had lost 40 kilos) – says excitedly that he has just been released from the prison at the Mezzeh air base: “Now we are in the center of Damascus. And I swear by Allah, and there is no God but Allah, that they were going to execute me and this man half an hour before the release.” The video went viral, as an example of how much a life and almost 14 years of war can change.
Today, a year later and at 39 years of age, that inmate, Ghazi Mohamed, is moved when he remembers his prepared execution in the courtyard and the noise of the helicopter blades that – as he would only understand later – had rushed to remove the soldiers before the rebel advance. “It was all very fast. Only a few minutes passed between when the helicopter took off and they came in to free us,” he says in the family carpet store in Maar Shurin, a town between the cities of Hama and Aleppo, where he has resumed business. Despite suffering pain from torture in prison and still being homeless (a bombing destroyed her, like hundreds of thousands of others in Syria), she has rebuilt her life and regained some of the weight she lost. In fact, it is difficult to find him: he travels often because his family business exports to neighboring countries and the Gulf.
With the benefit of time for reflection, Mohamed today believes that family assets (everyone knew they were doing well financially) weighed more in his arrest than politics. His family sympathized with the rebels and comes from the province of Idlib, where the lightning offensive that toppled Assad took place in secret for years, but two of his brothers had been arrested in the province of Daraa in 2011, and they were released paying a sum. He escaped to Lebanon.
In 2024, he says, he decided to move to Oman, for which he needed passports for his family. With hardly any fighting in much of Syria (where every procedure involved swiping some bills), he had two options: pay $5,000 to an intermediary or go to Damascus, then in the hands of the regime. “I asked some contacts and they told me that nothing would happen to me, that I could go down and save the $5,000,” he says in a repentant tone.
On the second day of their stay, a patrol surrounded the building and broke down the door. He ordered him and the friend who was accompanying him to lie down on the ground, he recalls. They were then handcuffed, covered with their faces, and taken to a solitary confinement cell, where “rats and worms came out of the toilet.” “I still remember the smell,” he adds.
“The first four days I couldn’t sleep, because they took me all the time to interrogate me. They hit me and asked what I was doing in Syria.” The problem, he soon understood, was not him, but his older brother in Idlib. All the questions focused on him. “They asked me who was who in the different armed groups and I told them the truth, that I lived in Lebanon.”
Seeing that they were getting nothing, “they resorted to more brutal methods to get him to confess,” he says. Mainly, handcuff him to a pipe overhead and leave him suspended, without his feet touching the ground. “I was like this for 11 days. They only stopped when they brought food or decided to let me go to the bathroom. I wanted to go back to the cell. It was another form of torture, but less violent. They asked me who was who. And I would have loved to know, so I would have something to give them. I didn’t understand what they wanted.”
After a month, he was taken to a cell without a toilet in Damascus. This is how he remembers his arrival:
– What’s your name, kid?
– Ghazi Mohammed al Mohammed.
– No. Forget you have a name, kid. From now on your name is 3006. So what’s your name, kid!?
– 3006.
He says he spent five months as a zombie. That he only understood the weight he had lost once in freedom. And he began to feel voices from an imaginary being. “You know, like those things you see in the movies,” he illustrates.
It was little compared to the long years that many thousands spent in a dictatorship with one hundred prisons (), an undetermined number of secret detention centers and, even today, at least 130,000 missing people.
In November 2024 and isolated from the rest of the world, he was completely unaware that an alliance of rebel militias was turning the tables on the war, making good the famous phrase attributed to the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin: “There are decades in which nothing happens and weeks in which decades pass.” Led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir El Sham (at the time, Abu Mohamed Al Jolani), they took territory from the regime at an astonishing rate. It lasted only 11 days, between escapes and mass surrenders of the soldiers and their allies, mainly Russia, Hezbollah and Iran.
He knows all that now. Then, he simply began to notice “strange things” in the prison. “Suddenly, the one who brought us food didn’t come. Or the one who accompanied us to the bathroom. One day, for example, we heard gunshots from a place where they weren’t supposed to.” He nervously swings his foot when he remembers it.
On December 8, the jailers opened all the individual cells. “They chained us and gathered us in the corridor, while using sectarian expressions [los insultaban por ser suníes]”, he describes. There were, he recalls with glassy eyes, 54 prisoners, placed in two rows.
“I saw everything prepared for execution. Even the barrels of diesel to blow up the site. I understood that it was the end.” Mohamed lowers his voice. It is not a secret for his brothers, but he does not want to say it out loud: and a taboo surrounds wishing for one’s own death, because only God decides its moment. “I had contradictory feelings. On the one hand I thought: ‘I have children, how are they going to live now’. On the other: ‘Enough, it’s time to rest’. A part of me was relieved that all this was over and I wondered what will happen to the soul when it separates from the body.”
Then he heard the sound of the helicopter landing; then, taking off and, progressively, mitigating until it disappears. Very soon after, he heard screams from the area where the prey were, like “Who are you!?” or “God is the greatest!” “I have thought a lot about what happened in the middle,” he points out. “I don’t think the soldiers had mercy. I think they just didn’t have time to kill us.”
The rebels arrived in their area and unleashed them. Mohamed “did not understand what was happening,” but he remembers “a very strong impulse to leave.” He did it barefoot and almost naked. In fact, he clarifies, the clothes in which he appears in the famous video are not his, but from families who gave them to him when they saw him like this on the street in the middle of winter. They also provided him with his first meal in freedom in months. They were just boiled eggs, but he found them “the most delicious” of his life. On the street, they began to tell him what was happening, and a relative who had come to look for him found him asking the rest.
Today, Mohamed remembers that, during his months in prison, he would abstract himself from his terrible daily reality by imagining that his nephews would appear by surprise on a motorcycle to free him. Or that he fulfilled the pillar of Islam of making a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in his life. The first was not necessary. He did the second last June, in the last pilgrimage season and with the smile of someone who knows he was close to death.
